. >> eric: the reality is, we have a spending problem, steve. how much money we're actually taxing, tax revenues are going up. >> they have to. >> eric: it's a spending issue. if we're putting a trillion dollars into the deficit you can't fix that with taxes. >> no, you sure can't. eric, when i first came to washington, which was about 25 years ago, we barely had a trillion dollar budget and here we are, 25 years later and we're closing in on a 4 trillion dollar budget and that under democrats and republicans as well and there haven't been serious cuts in spending in this town in at least 10 or 15 years and i'm kind of frustrated that neither party is really serious about getting these spending programs under control. i mean, we have been-- you look at entitlement programs and president obama and a lot of democrats say we can't cut medicare, social security, medicaid. and that's half the budget there. of course, we're spending 600, 700 billion dollars a year just to pay the interest on the debt. just on the interest. so you don't get any return